If you plan going on the ITX motherboard, Intel lead the way with small & efficient platform.

On the other end, if you go with a micro atx board, amd have the feature lead for the price in this category. More heat and less efficient than Intel by the way. Plus, you will be able too upgrade it with the 2011 amd processor. On the Intel side, you won't.

It is up to you to decide witch size do you prefer the most!
;)

But on both size, you don't need a tremendous amount of power, exept if you vertualize like 2 servers 2003 with 1 serveur 2008 domain controller and like 4 or 5 xp machines...
^^

The issue I have with Intel branded boards, in particular the ITX based products, is the complete lack of bios "tweaks" available. I'm an enthusiast at heart & this just won't do even though with respect to tweaking, I'm not going to far with this build. I love the build quality of their boards though.

With respect to virtualization, I do not need to run servers on this box as I already have a dedicated Bare Metal Hypervisor based XenServer 5.5 box running 24/7. I do though like to keep up with Linux releases so I usually end up checking out the latest distributions via VirtualBox running on the desktop.

P.S. I really appreciate your input.

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GOD Is Good
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